Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

I often help out at the funeral home. I usually go over for a couple of hours a day and do the bookkeeping and help clean the place up. Since I don’t work, other than volunteering at the elementary school library, I don’t mind lending a hand. Sometimes I’ll even greet people at the door; it’s the type of town where I can almost greet everyone who walks through the door by name.

My husband and I have two children, a boy and a girl, who are exactly a year apart. Kelli is a senior and Trevor is a junior in high school. Four years ago, when the kids were in middle school, I had my first dose of providing service to a loved one when we got that middle-of-the-night call from an Indiana State Patrolman. I guess I always viewed Anthony’s profession as serving the families of little old ladies and stately old gentlemen of the community. Clean death. Timely death. Theoretical death. Anthony is a little more steeled in dealing with death, but for me, the experience was all at once confusing and devastating. But even in the shadow of death, I ended up learning a lot about life.

It all began with the dreadful call.

It wasn’t unusual to receive middle-of-the-night phone calls, and it wasn’t until my husband sat up and exclaimed, “Oh, my God! Where? When?,” that I knew something was terribly wrong. Anthony scribbled something on a scrap of paper and said, “Thank you, officer. Please pass along to the family that we’ll be there as quickly as we can.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. There was a knot in my stomach, though I didn’t know why.

“Marie,” he said. His face was white. “There’s been a terrible accident. Jim and little Jimmy are dead. Grace and Phoebe are in intensive care.”

I felt like I had been punched in the gut. Jim and Grace Brewer are close friends of ours. Jim and Anthony had been friends in high school and when Grace and Jim had started going together shortly after Anthony and I married, we had double-dated a lot. Their son and daughter were exactly our son and daughter’s ages and they went to school together.

“How?” I managed to get out.

Anthony put his glasses on, got out of bed, and clicked the light on. “On their way back from Jim’s parents in Chicago, they got into a car wreck. That’s all I know right now.” His voice was unusually tight. “Get your clothes on. I’ll call my mom and see if she can come over and watch the kids.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you’re going.”

“What? Why?” I was confused, and scared.

“Your friend’s husband is dead and she’s laying in a hospital somewhere. She needs you. We’ve got to go take care of our friends.”

I got out of bed and mechanically put my clothes on. I felt like Tom Hanks in the movie Saving Private Ryan when he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day; sounds were muted and everything moved in slow motion. It took me forever to put my clothes on and brush my hair back into a ponytail. By the time I got downstairs Anthony had every light in the house blazing and was gone.

I sat at the kitchen counter. Anthony and his mother and father pulled up simultaneously, Anthony in the hearse, and his parents in their Buick. “Hi Mom. Hi Dad,” I said automatically as they trooped in. Anthony’s dad was still in his pajamas and his mom in her nightie. They had obviously been roused from a deep sleep.

His mother rushed over and gave me a giant hug. “Oh, Marie!” she said. “We’re so sorry. Jim was such a nice boy!”

“You okay here?” Anthony asked his parents. He was all business.

“Of course, Tony!” his mother said. “Go, go.”

“Get the kids up and off to school. Bus comes at ten of seven.”

“Where should we tell them you’ve gone?” his mother asked.

“I don’t know, Mom,” he said. He sounded tired all of a sudden. “Make something up. Marie and I will tell them about the Brewers when we get back. No sense you having to do that.”

We said goodbye and Anthony and I got in the hearse.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Looks like it’s going to be a four or five hour ride from here. Hopefully, traffic won’t be that bad this time of night.”

I looked at the clock. It read 11:49.

“How are you going to get two bodies into the back of this thing?” I asked, craning around to peer through the little window partition separating the cabin from the bed of the hearse. It looked like there was only one cot in the back.

“Reeves cot.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a collapsible cot that folds up. Like a reinforced yoga mat, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll put the boy on that. They’ll both fit.”

I noticed how he didn’t call Jimmy by name, but “the boy.”

“Okay,” I said, still numb.

As we drove up through Kentucky, Anthony and I were both silent. I wracked my brain for something to say to Grace. Anything. I couldn’t think of any words of encouragement or sympathy that fit this situation. Her husband and child were dead! Dead. For the longest time I just sat in silence, thinking, but not thinking. The tension built in me as I searched and nothing came. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer and blurted out, “What am I supposed to say to her, Ant?”